Frederiksborg slot i måneskin

Frederiksborg, the great Renaissance seat of the Oldenburg kings, stands across its lake under a full moon, and Johan Christian Dahl signed it with the year: J. Dahl 1817. Dahl (1788–1857) had come to Copenhagen in 1811 to study at the Academy and left for Dresden in 1818; in those Danish years he painted the castle more than once and returned again and again to the subject of moonlight — a moonlit Stege in 1815, the harbour of Copenhagen by moonlight in 1817 — and the night piece lets him do what no daylight view can, turning a building of state into a silhouette and its water into a second, unstable image of it. With Caspar David Friedrich he became a founding figure of Romantic landscape painting, and this small canvas belongs to the works that made his name. It is catalogued as no. 104 in Marie Lødrup Bang’s catalogue raisonné, and it appeared in the 1988 Dahl jubilee exhibition in Oslo and Bergen and in the 2006 exhibition Moonrise over Europe; the gallery’s picture entered the collection in 1872.